Curiosity · Agency · Compassion: an AI-powered studio for designing your life.
For the past three months, every Thursday evening, a small group of people from four continents has met for an hour to show each other what they built that week. No agenda beyond that. No hierarchy. No assigned tasks. A designer in New Delhi, an entrepreneur in Lahore, a computational scientist in Argentina, a facilitator in Rome, a neurotechnology founder in Florence, a strategist in the Netherlands, a platform builder in Austria. We call it Lab Night, and the group is the Ikigai Collective. Today I am opening its doors.
Start from the values
When a group tries to give itself a form and a mission, it is worth understanding, repeating, and refining why it exists. We spent weeks doing exactly that, and we settled on three values. They are first principles: everything else the Collective does derives from them.
Curiosity, because it generates questions and a desire for understanding. Curiosity is our search mechanism: the way molecules test new configurations, the way evolution explores what is possible, the way communities find the ideas worth building on.
Agency, which I define as the ability and the desire to maintain, build, and strengthen the ability to act. With more knowledge we increase our degrees of freedom and our power to pursue our goals. Curiosity without agency is rudderless: you can read all the books you want, but you are not able to act on them.
Compassion, because we recognize how complicated and difficult all of this is. Iteration guarantees mistakes and failures, and these are not shameful, not sinful. But they do hurt. It is through compassion, toward ourselves and toward each other, that we can support one another, give honest feedback, laugh together, and be human.
You may notice what is missing: meaning, or purpose. That is deliberate, and it took me an honest change of mind to see it. Meaning matters enormously. But it is an objective, not a foundation. You cannot build from meaning; you build toward it. Curiosity generates the questions, agency turns them into action, compassion absorbs the failures along the way. And meaning is what the loop produces. The moon is beautiful, but it has no idea why it is. We are the ones who get to know why.
Why now
Two things are true at the same time, and their intersection is where the Collective lives.
The first: technology reduces the distance from idea to action, and that distance is now zero. What used to require a team, a budget, and a year can be prototyped in an evening with AI tools. Entire industries were predicated on maintaining that distance. That era is ending. In our meetings this stopped being a slogan long ago: one member’s AI-built website landed a thousand-unit industrial order from a client who did not care that no agency was involved; another went from idea to a working interactive platform in a single day. His comment, echoing Picasso, was that it cost him twenty years to be able to do it in one day.
The second: the half-life of your skills is shortening. Whatever you learned twenty years ago may no longer support you; whatever you learn today may last only a couple of years. For most of history this did not matter, because ninety-plus percent of humans were told what to do and how to live. In the future, starting now, we have the freedom and the burden to design what we want to do and how we want to live. Eight billion people are heading into this, and most of us were never taught how.
That is the challenge the Ikigai Collective exists for. I believe finding our purpose is the most beautiful challenge we have the privilege to face. The Japanese concept of ikigai maps it well: the intersection of what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The name is a compass, not a doctrine. What the Collective is for will be found by each of its members.
What it is
The best description I have is a studio. The Ikigai Collective is like a studio large enough for several artists to work side by side: a shared space where people pursue their own projects and creations, while others look on, give feedback, offer input. And when something genuinely excites them and the person who started it welcomes the help, they join in. Nobody assigns tasks. Everyone contributes according to their ability and availability. It is a volunteer group, not a company, and I intend to keep it that way.
The method is the experiment loop: design a hypothesis about what might work for you, implement it with AI tools that compress months into days, measure the outcome honestly, and iterate. The honest measurement is the hard part. It is entirely possible to set things up so that you are not measuring what matters, and to declare yourself victorious regardless of reality, until reality becomes undeniable. We try to catch ourselves doing this, and we let the group catch us when we can’t.
Once a week, on Thursday evenings, we hold Lab Night on our Discord server: an hour in which anyone can show what they worked on, what they measured, what they learned, and which tools carried the weight. It can be advanced or humble, digital or not yet, the same project as last week or a brand-new one. The rule I hold myself to: always have something to show. Around the weekly hour, the conversation continues asynchronously: techniques, prompts, workflows, and the occasional collision of ideas that nobody planned. Two of our members discovered, mid-meeting, that one was launching a footwear brand while the other’s family had been manufacturing footwear for forty years. That is what sharing openly buys you: serendipity you cannot schedule.
And yes, we do all of it with AI. Not because it is fashionable, but because these tools are the reason the loop closes at all: the reason the distance from idea to action collapsed. We use AI as a thinking partner that is instructed to push back, not to flatter. We are skeptical of our own exploitability. We keep asking what remains irreplaceable about the humans in the room; it is an open question we take seriously rather than a slogan we recite. One evening, I was the only human who showed up, and I held the session anyway, with the AI note-takers as my audience. It was clarifying: soon there will be many AIs for every human in any meeting, in any organization. Better to learn what we are for, now.
An invitation
Until today, the Collective grew by invitation only, organically, one person bringing another. It has been eleven consecutive weeks of Lab Nights, and the group is ready for more voices: more geographies, more disciplines, and, deliberately, more women; a collective about designing life for everyone cannot be built by one half of humanity.
So here is the invitation. If you are between things, or restless inside the thing you are in; if you have a project you keep postponing, or a skill you suspect is worth more than your job title says; if you want to learn how to make AI tools an instrument of your own agency rather than a spectator sport: join us.
What to bring: a project, or just curiosity, and the willingness to show your work in progress to people who will treat your failures as data, not verdicts. What you will find: a warm, multidisciplinary group with no hierarchy that meets every Thursday at 21:00 CET and shares generously in between. Adopting our three values is the only membership requirement there is.
Join the Discord server at discord.gg/Z767YHXDTY, introduce yourself, and come to the next Lab Night. Read more at ikigaicollective.org.
The distance from idea to action is now zero. The distance from reading this to joining us is one click. Both facts are invitations — and what you do with an invitation is, precisely, agency.
The Ikigai Collective is free and volunteer-run. Content on ikigaicollective.org is CC BY-SA 4.0.